AllFreeNovel
Share Us
ed to want her to do, yet, loving him so much, and wanting to please, she thrust her tongue out and briefly touched his satin hardness. When she heard his groan of pleasure and watched his expression become passion consumed, she resumed with what she knew had to be perhaps the keenest pleasure of all.
She loved him in that fashion, the strange ritual even firing her own desires again. When he placed his hands at her waist and lifted her atop him in a sitting position, so that his hardness was soon inside her, again she was introduced to a new way of loving him.
Riding him, moving with him as he drove himself up into her, she held her head back and closed her eyes, feeling a strange soft melting energy warming her insides. The air became heavy with the inevitability of release, each stroke within her promising more.
And then they both seemed unable to hold the energy back any longer, and in unison trembled and shook against the other.
When the bliss slowly ebbed away, Mariah crept from atop Echohawk and snuggled next to him, feeling so wonderfully at peace, deliciously in tune with the man she loved.
When her fears of his discovering who she was began edging back inside her consciousness, she quickly cast them aside.
For now she must forget the doom that awaited her when she revealed all truths to the man she loved. For now there was a pure and beautiful understanding between them.
She glanced over at the meat cooking over the fire, ravenous, yet not wanting to give up whatever time she had with Echohawk to eat. Food meant absolutely nothing to her in his presence.
Echohawk was all that she desired.
Only him.
Chapter 15
We both can speak of one love,
Which time can never change.
—Jefferys
Sunrise splashed a golden sheen through the smokehole overhead. After a breakfast of pemmican cakes made of meat, dried and pounded to a pulp, and wild honey, Mariah was filled with joy as she left the wigwam with Echohawk to again accompany him to target practice. Just as they reached their tethered horses, a familiar voice behind them drew them around.
“There is something I would like to show you,” Chief Silver Wing said, a mischievous sparkle in his dark eyes. He beckoned with a hand. “Come with me to my dwelling.”
Having grown comfortable even with this noble, powerful chief, Mariah walked in a casual gait beside Echohawk as they went with Chief Silver Wing to his wigwam.
“Nah-mah-dah-bee-yen, sit,” Silver Wing said, gesturing toward mats that lay thickly cushioned beside the lodge fire. Snug in a finely dressed buffalo robe that befitted his high position, he sat down opposite them, reaching for something inside a small buckskin pouch that hung from the waistband of his fringed breeches. “I may have something of interest for you, Echohawk.”
Mariah eased down onto a mat beside Echohawk. Then her whole world as she had come to know it these last wonderful days was threatened as she saw what Chief Silver Wing took from the pouch. She paled and stifled a gasp as she looked warily at a gold-framed pair of eyeglasses that he was handing toward Echohawk.
Eyeglasses! she fretted to herself.
Her whole body became enveloped in cold shivers as she guardedly watched Echohawk take the eyeglasses, seemingly puzzled by them as his fingers familiarized themselves with their shape and with the glass that lay within the frames.
“What is this?” he asked, still fingering the object. “It feels like what I have seen white people wear. I believe they are called eyeglasses?”
“Ay-uh, I offer you eyeglasses that I took from a white pony soldier many, many snows ago while defending my village against their attack, long before the time of our mutual friend Colonel Snelling,” Chief Silver Wing said, nodding. “I have heard that eyeglasses are supposed to better one’s vision. You have a problem with your eyesight. Perhaps they will benefit you somehow—make you see. Wear them. See if there is magic in them.”
Mariah felt light-headed in her fear as Echohawk continued feeling the glasses, his fingers smoothing slowly over the lenses.
This was the moment she had dreaded most.
His discovery of who she truly was!
If the eyeglasses should work for Echohawk, he would soon see to whom he had given his heart and his total trust.
With that thought, an ill feeling swept through Mariah. One moment she had been so happy her heart had sung, and the next, her whole world was tumbling around her.
Mariah’s heart pounded and she held her breath as she watched Echohawk slowly slip the eyeglasses onto the bridge of his nose.
Echohawk squinted as he looked through the lenses; then the blood pumped maddeningly through his veins in his excitement over discovering that, ay-uh, he could see! The eyeglasses were made of some sort of white-man magic! He could make out everything distinctly!
